Christ, Christianity and the Bible. Haldeman Isaac Massey
man. A God who gave you mind with seemingly infinite possibilities in thought, and gave you a body that is finite and temporary in construction. A God who gives you an intellect which grasps after eternity, and is always saying on the summit of any endeavor achieved, “What next?” and yet is limited to a few inconsequent years. A God who sets you face to face with the imminency of death, and never allows you to know at what moment you must go, and gives you no hint of the beyond – or whether there is a beyond.
In France they do not tell the man who is to be guillotined till a few moments before the fatal hour. He is sleeping on his couch. He is dreaming of pleasant fields, of running streams, of boyhood’s days, of to-morrows that shall be better – a heavy hand is laid on his shoulder – he starts up in bed – the gray light of early morning is filtering in through the barred window of his cell – stern-faced men are standing before him – they say, “Your hour is come; follow us.”
It is terrific.
But this is the case of every human being.
No one can tell when the summons may come – or where.
A man was sitting in his room at close of day. It had been (so he said) the best day of his life. He had said to his wife that he never loved her more than he did then (and they had been married many years), never did he feel more content that they had chosen to walk together through life than then. He was full of plans for himself and for her (saying with great earnestness that their last days should be their best days). She answered back that she was glad with a great gladness that it was so. She turned away for a moment to glance in another direction, still speaking to him. When she looked back he was gone – gone while the love words and the hope words were still on his lips – the finger of death had touched his heart – a voice had whispered in his ear, “Come.” There was only a lifeless bit of clay where a moment before had been a body pulsing with life, with love, with hope.
It is terrific – doomed – and not knowing how soon the bolt will strike. What sort of a God is this who laces your body with a network of laws, the breaking of the slightest of which – all unknown to you – may send you forth upon a path of diseased and tortured existence – in which the body from whence you cannot escape shall be to you as a chamber of horrors – a place of the thumbscrew, the rack and the fagot. What kind of a God is that who allows the aged to linger out in a miserable prolongation of wretched days, a burden to themselves, a burden to others, and takes away the widow’s only son – her only support? Who is the God who creates one man with all the equipment for life, and another man with all the lack of it? What kind of a God is this who looks down out of the heaven of day and the heavens of night, and sees all the sorrow, the anguish, the pain, the unspeakable tragedies, and sends no wing of angel to cleave the pitiless sky, no voice out of the silence to console, no hand to help?
What man is there of you, if he had the power, would not banish sickness, sorrow, pain and death?
What man is there of you who, if he could, would not make every human being well and happy?
What then? What is the conclusion of the matter concerning you? Simple enough – you have the heart to do it, but not the power.
What is the conclusion concerning this God of nature? He has the power – but does not manifest the heart.
What will you say of this God of nature in such a scheme?
What can you say but that your heart is better than the heart of the God which nature reveals?
Can you hear, understand and love a God like that?
Can you climb through nature up to nature’s God and say, “I have found him, I know him?”
You can climb up, but where will you find him?
You will find him wrapped in the black thundercloud or girded with the robe of the lightnings: You will find him the God who splits the earth in twain with the earthquake’s riving blow, loosens the bands of the sea, sends tidal waves in surges of destruction, pours out the lava streams from the volcano’s cone, as kings pour wine from an earthen cup, spilling the wine and breaking the cup; the God who turns an earthly paradise (like Messina) into a fire-smitten desert, and a city of the living into a cemetery of the unburied dead.
When your heart aches, will such a God care for you? Will his thunders console you? When your soul is dark, will his lightnings illumine it? When you yearn for love, will his inexorable law supply it?
Ah, sirs, without Christ you are without a God whom you can love, whom you can trust, to whom you can go, and in whose strength you can lie down and – at last – be folded in peace.
If Jesus Christ is not God, if the only God to whom you can go is the God of nature, then you might as well fall down in the sand at the base of the far Egyptian sphinx, open your eyes for a moment to the blue sky that spreads away to the horizon before its staring face, its cold, chiselled, inscrutable smile, and the next moment shut your eyes against the pelting dust the idle winds blow thither.
Ah! Nature is a sand-dune – and the God of nature is a Sphynx.
Do you care to kneel and worship there?
If Jesus Christ be not God the disaster is not alone to him, but to you – to me.
If he were not God, then we are in a world where the very day is no better or brighter than a starless midnight.
If Jesus Christ were a good man, a supremely good man and a supremely intellectual man, then he was and is (as he claimed) Almighty God.
The New Testament says he was a supremely good, and a supremely intellectual man.
For two thousand years the most brilliant men in the world have corroborated this record by freely testifying that Jesus Christ was a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man; all this being so, I change the conditional form of the proposition to the indicative and declarative and now say:
Since Jesus Christ was a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man, he was, therefore (as he claimed), Almighty God.
He could not be a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man and claim to be God unless he were God.
Since he claimed to be God, therefore, he was God.
Yes; he was God.
The evidences are manifold.
He was sinless.
He said:
“Which of you convinceth me of sin?”
For two thousand years he has been in the concentrated light of a hostile world’s merciless investigation. The light has been turned on the land in which he lived. Every rod of ground over which he travelled has been dug up, or surveyed, or trodden. His words have been weighed, balanced to a nicety against any probability of error, mistake, imagination, fancy or misquotation. His words have been split open as men break open rocks. All the contents of his words have been put in the crucible of criticism. Every thought has been insistently and unsentimentally assayed for, even, the suspicion or the slightest hint of an alloy. His teachings have been chemically dissolved and turned into their component parts. The saline base of truth has been sought for at any risk to the compounded speech he made.
And after all! not one self-respecting, authoritative lip has uttered a charge against him.
In the hush of a world that cannot even murmur, he steps forward and once more rings down his challenge:
“Which of you convinceth me of sin?”
He stands out among his fellows as a white shaft under a starless midnight. He rises above the passions of men as an unshaken rock in the midst of a wild, lashed sea. He is to man’s best character as harmony is to discord, as a smile is to a frown, as love is to hate, as blessing is to cursing, as a garden of lilies to a desert of sand, as heaven is to earth, as holiness is to sin and as life to death.
If he were sinless, he was absolutely holy; he was so holy that his very presence brought out the sin in others. Sinful men and women fell at his feet and confessed their sins. At sight of him demons tore their way out of the bodies they possessed and fled as clouds of darkness before the sun, crying as they fled, “Thou art the holy one